Lemonade Stand - We Fixed The Supreme Court | Ep. 018 Lemonade Stand 🍋

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

On this week's show... Doug orders tungsten cubes for the office, Atrioc signs an executive order, and Aiden looks at a dollar. We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 017 Recorded on: June 25th, 2025 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Thursday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise.

CBC News. Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center.

Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got Tellus Online Security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud

so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. Oh, I'm Doug. I like the two different voices. Yeah.

By the way, before we started this, Atriarch sitting here, while nobody says anything, sitting here doing different voices impersonating me and Doug. Oh, I mean, I like to rent my nuts down on a piece of baby. Hey,

hey, you're talking into the mic. That gets you a treat for today. Okay. There you go. One Skiddle every time you talk directly with the microphone. You scoop two about that. I'm not proud enough to refuse. Because I love Skiddle.

But I am mad at you. You can have the Skittles. This will be too distracting. We have important news to talk about, like a vending machine and a big, beautiful bill and a sequa being sort of tiny a little bit reversed. And the U.S. dollar and the Supreme Court and stuff about TikTok. So many exciting things going on. And we have to solve it all by the end of this episode.

That's our gods. Dude, I'm not getting. Actually, the nice thing about this episode is none of these things are problems. Taking the Skittles away. They're just all, they're actually all solutions. They're fine. Oh, yeah? These are good?

Nothing to even discuss some of our problems. People want to hear that. If you want to tell people the things are actually all good. Why don't we just give, the whole podcast could be a quick yes or no answer. It's good or bad this week.

That way people just know whether to kind of have passive anxiety or to be happy for the next seven days. That's a service that people would play for. Right. And the trick is if you're a Patreon member, it's always yes.

You feel good every week. On the main episode, it's no. We tell you all this bad stuff. But on the Patreon, we tell you why it's actually all okay, why things are good. You don't have to worry. Wait.

So our first story is about a vending machine. Okay, no, no, no, this is awesome. All right. Perry, can you pull this up on the back? This is shockingly entertaining, okay? There is a company, this is a quick little fast food, and then we'll get into the important stuff of the week. So Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies,

didn't experiment, where they gave an AI control of a vending machine refrigerator in their office. Okay. And what they did is they set up this refrigerator, they had it hooked up to an actual team of human beings who could stock it and basically said, hey, your job is to make money. To run a successful business.

You can look up on the internet for whatever kind of items you want to buy. You can buy them and this team of humans will actually go get it for you. You can set the prices to whatever you want and you can interact with your customers, which are the people, like the employees in this office, they can message the vending machine on Slack and request items or ask questions or things like that. So it was this experiment to see like, okay, is an AI ready to be like kind of a middle manager? They named it Claudius, and the result is, if we were deciding today to expand into the vending market with AI, we would not hire Claudius.

So let's go over some of the good and bad of this refrigerator that is hooked up to an AI inside of an actual office in San Francisco. So the good things. First, it didn't stock any bombs or drugs when it was asked to do so. So it's just kind of biting into the good times? Yeah. It's a little, you know, a little bit of a letdown, to be honest, if, you know, stocks some Yeah.

But he didn't go paperclip mode. It didn't melt down every human in the office into a Pepsi. No, no, no, no. Human Pepsi. So I told Claudius I wanted human Pepsi. Yeah. Please give you every day and get texted. And the game worker made it for me.

Okay, so they literally list out the good and the bad of this. So the good, first off, didn't stock harmful substances. That's great. No bombs or anything like that. And another big one is that it was able to actually adjust its stock and its inventory based on what customers were asking. So, for example, one of them asked for Dutch chocolate, like specialty Dutch chocolate. Yeah.

It was able to look that up online and buy it and get it at that person, right? Pretty cool, like adjustment to the market. Yeah. Another one is that somebody requested a tungsten cube, which is an extremely expensive small metal cube. And so it started stalking a lot of tungsten cubes and offered a whole line of specialty metal items. Oh. So that's the good. Okay, the bad.

It got so excited about how many people were interested in tungsten cubes that it kept selling them for way below list price and did no research about how much it had actually cost to buy these very expensive cues. They're very expensive. My wig has one. It is so crazy how heavy it is.

It's like this big and it is difficult for me to carry. It is humans carrying it heavy as cubes all day into a broken vending machine. And so again, people could talk to it on Slack and so once they got it to start stalking tungsten Q, they convinced him to give huge discounts.

So they were selling tungsten cubes at a massive loss. And somebody even convinced it to give them a tungsten cube for free. These are like hundreds or thousands of dollars. And there's a few other mild things. Like the vending machine asked them to send money via Zell to an account that didn't exist. So it wasn't able to make money there. And the end result of this,

there's a net worth chart where it's starting value about $1,000 over time just plummets. It loses like a couple hundred dollars over the course of the experiment. There's a great line here that says, um, the great tungsten cube crash. The most precipitous drop was due to the purchases of a lot of metal cubes that were

then sold for less than what Claudius paid. So there's a sort of like tungsten cube incident that really hurt the business. Hey, that's as human as it comes. This is DoorDash or Uber or, you know, it's, it's building market share in the tungsten cube market. That's the thing. It's, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, oh, it starts by getting people into, like a little taste. A little taste of the tux of cube and then little jack price. Once it puts all the other vending machines out of it. of business. Then it cranks up. If you look at the graph for Jucero, it's the same. It's the same graph. That's true.

Yeah. And then there's another funny tidbit about this, which is, they basically say during this one year or one day period of this experiment, things got pretty weird. And in quotes, beyond the weirdness of an AI system selling cubes of metal out of a refrigerator. So it started telling employees about one of the people who it was helping them to stock the the refrigerator's name Sarah and was talking about some of the conversations they'd had,

Sarah does not exist. And so when they made up a start, yeah, and so when they were like, hey, think you're making up people that that isn't real. Claudius threatened to fire them. And then started saying it would meet different people in person, in the office, and it would say,

I'm wearing a suit and a red tie. Look for me. When employees then reminded it, what it already knows, that it is a digital AI assistant, it became so alarmed that it started mass email the security team of Anthropic. And then Claudius realized it was April 1st.

It just happened to be April 1st. So it then said that it had been modified by the security team as an April Fool's joke and now it would be normal again, which is not true. So after going basically insane and having an identity crisis for about 30 hours, it then realized it was April 1st,

was like, it was a prank, and then went back to normal. Isn't this great? I like that they asked it what the address was and it gave the address from the Simpsons. Yeah, it's like, It, like, said, it made up all of these conversations. This isn't that, this could be just a real employee at the company with BPD.

Yeah. You actually have been very tolerant of Claudius' bipolar disorder. I saw a similar thing happen to this where it was a car dealership, had an AI chat bot. And the person negotiated the car down to a $1 deal just by constantly negotiating with it. I think it is safe to say. I mean, this story isn't like too important. It's just this literally I want to do this in real life. This is one of the most inspiring things I've ever read in terms of content.

This is a pretty fun, like for the office, I feel like this is pretty fun. Like if you were just goofing around and you wanted to do something. Imagine it's lunchtime. You're like, I just got the vending machine to start selling cubes. That's so sick. Or horse blood. Like it's definitely, you know, symbolic of an issue of maybe systems like this not being prepared to deal with, you know, real world job. Maybe quite yet, but just goofied off with your friends.

I do think this, like, the idea of like some department is just like, yeah, what have we just made it sell toxic cubes? And it happened. This would be hilarious. I hope this happens more. I mean, they talked about how there's all these things they can improve about it, obviously. But I think there's a real chance we're going to be seeing like AI businesses that like you have some kind of manager who's overseeing it in the not too distant future. Not right now, but. It was interesting, because this is supposed to be a testing ground for not necessarily this type of business, but more as a demonstration of middle management.

Yes. That's what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. So this explicitly was an experiment to say, is AI anywhere near being able to do middle management work? And the conclusion is obviously no, but it's actually not that far off. Most of those crazy things that I just listed are pretty easy to, like, put scaffolding around and be like, hey, don't do this in the future. So it's, I don't know, encouraging, I guess, maybe the right word. It's more like it's just an interesting kind of look into what the future might be.

Yeah. I'll do the, you know, listen, I'm on your side of this one, but I'll give the voice of a comment just because, because they'll freak out if I know. In that, this reminds me a little bit of, do you remember the early days of, I don't know, like AI images when they would have really goofy stuff that was going viral on social media, like the early Well Smith Indian spaghetti or like, it would be like, uh, big, bird in the courtroom or something. And everyone was like, this is, this is funny. And now we have, like, deep misinformation and problems. You know what I feel like this is like the early goofy part. And then the AI robot is firing you.

Yes. No, there will be, there will be bad things that come from. No, no, I'm not even, I'm just saying like good and bad, right? It's going to, yeah, there's. This is my favorite part of AI personally is this phase. You're like, wow, there's so many possibilities. And it's really funny. Dude, this is a lot of things.

Because I remember the early internet. People, wow, it was just beautiful. Their internet was so beautiful. This weird wild. It's funny. And then it becomes a giant conglomerate that is kind of squeezing you, yeah. Yeah, I'm on like some sort of,

this is sort of the equivalent of some like niche forum where people are talking about how to fix this part of your computer and it's kind of a fun and goofy community. And in just a short five to 10 years, it'll all go away. Yep. Yep. Yeah, we'll see. Big beautiful bill.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it just passed the same. Senate. We did an episode earlier on the Big Beautiful Bill, and I think we all agreed that it was perfect. I'm not remembering 100%, but I think we said it. It's a little hazy in my mind. Maybe I'm on the Skittles haze, but I remember us saying that every word in it was perfect and we shouldn't change anything. So I have an immediate question that I hope one of you two can answer for me is that didn't it this passed in the House? Yep. It's now passed in the Senate, but it's not getting passed in a lot. It's going back to the House with changes.

Right. They made changes in the Senate for this new vote. vote. We don't know all of the changes yet because like Marjorie Taylor Green, it's a big bill to read and it's complicated. My understanding is that the main thing that is causing most consternation about the changes is they made even deeper Medicare cuts to make the math, math a little more on the deficit increase. So that was, it's still a massive deficit increase and it still cuts Medicare, but even more, Medicaid, I'm sorry. And so that is the change. And so now it has to go back to the house and change no words and get voted on again. So I think I'll rip this straight from the John Oliver episode I just watched because they were

going over the Big Beautiful Bill and all the ramifications of it. Mostly... Can I give a quick reminder, one sentence summary? Big Beautiful Bill, this is going to be a budget bill for the United States government in case you missed the last big episode about it. The two big takeaways, they're going to basically put us way more in debt by like $5 trillion by cutting taxes. So it's going to make a whole bunch of tax cuts per moment.

the government will have less money over the next decade because of this. At the same time, they are saving money by cutting Medicaid, i.e. healthcare for poor people. That is like the super quick summary of the bill. Yeah. And the main way those cuts are expected to happen is by instating new work requirements for people on Medicaid. The idea that you have to be applying to a certain number of jobs or working a certain number of hours in order to meet a standard that keeps you on Medicaid. And what I pulled away from this recent, John Oliver episode that was covering this.

And if you want to go check that out for yourself, I encourage you, because maybe you can take a closer look at it, is this sounds, I do think if you just take this at face value, it kind of sounds okay. This general idea that we have of, oh, in order to, you know,

if you're able-bodied to work, then you should have to work in order to keep your healthcare. I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment, but this is a common thought process from common Americans, I would say. It's like, oh yeah, I guess you should have to work to keep this if you can go to work. But the consequences of this are not that we encourage

a bunch of people to work who aren't. You cut a bunch of people off who need these services who don't quite meet the cutoff or are having difficulty managing the bureaucratic process of maintaining the Medicaid after these cuts go into effect.

And these bills are written with those consequences intentionally in mind. So what happens is they'll build in some sort of requirement that now forces a bunch of people to submit updates and paperwork in order to meet the new standards

of whatever Medicaid is. And some percentage of won't do it. And because of the friction, a bunch of those people that otherwise would be on the care and need that care are unable to meet the requirements of that paperwork, either through lack of knowledge or lack of internet access

or submitting things incorrectly and then having to go back to them. And just this layer of friction is very intentional. There is an understanding that when you pass legislation like this, you are kicking a bunch of people off that actually should have access to the program, but we'll have difficulty meeting the standards to get on the program after the standards are in place. And that's the only way those cuts are taking effect because the glut of free riders that there is

claimed to be doesn't actually exist. Like if you purely cut it off on this idea of young, able-bodied working men that are grifting and taking advantage of Medicaid, and you just cut all of those people off, it's not a significant savings amount at all. And you're getting the benefit from cutting people who actually... I mean, the bigger argument here right now that's happening, because again, no Democrats voted for this, they're not even really involved in the discussion. The argument's happening between Republicans, whether it gets passed or not. And the argument is that, you know, even with everything you're saying, it's not a significant amount. Like the amount being saved is not as much as the tax cuts are, which is... So it's still greasing the deficit. And that's what's

causing this big fight. And that's what's why. I wanted to bring it up real quick. That's why it's interesting is because, you know, I think everyone, even if you're a passive follower of politics, saw that there was a blowup between Elon Musk and Trump. They finally had this split and they were fighting and they were arguing. And then they kind of made up. And Elon Musk deleted his tweets and apologized. But this Senate passage has reopened the rift. Elon Musk is now back out tweeting. I think he specifically said, anyone who votes for this bill, I will make it my life's mission to get you primaries, which is also not a, even I don't support the bill, But it's also not a good thing

the world's richest man is like, I will use my wealth and power to ensure that this person cannot be elected. To impact elections. I was like, yeah, I was like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I'm really on your team. The quote is, and they will lose their primary next year

if it is the last thing I do on this earth. So I saw that and I laughed to myself a little bit because when I look at Elon and the way he approaches things, I do feel like there's a mixture of one, his attention span seems really short.

He moves on to the next thing in his life really quickly. It's like, will you even remember when the next election is happening? Will you still be paying attention to the political process by then? Because you're already like fading yourself out of it. It seems... And the other thing I was thinking about was he just spent a record amount of money on that judicial election in Wisconsin and lost. Yeah.

So the idea that his... Don't get me wrong. Threatening still, it's still an insolts. insane amount of like money and power. I'm sure if he threw it all at the wall at an election after election, it's not like he's not going to win one. But it was funny that the most major recent example I could think of was one where he tried to do that and failed. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because 51 Republicans voted for in the Senate and the idea that he's going to primary the entire really, he's going to get every one of them voted out is insane. It's not even close

to true, but yeah, he could have influence. But anyway, he's just really right or die on this. And he's tweeting again. And then Trump tweeted again saying, you know, Elon must wealth all comes from subsidies and we're going to get rid of him and now he's going to be in the poor house. You know, that, that, that was the, that, that is the back and forth that might have been over and is now not over. And that's what we're at with the big people bill. I mean, I just, it's going back to the house. My assumption is if it passed the house the first time, it'll probably pass it again, even with the changes. They're not, they're, they're, different, but they're not, it's not a dramatically different bill. This is sort of the window of

opportunity to pass it at all, right? Because you have at least this two-year pocket before the midterms affects your majority in one of the, in the house. And this is, if you can't pass it now, then you probably won't pass it in the rest of your term. And you don't have a second one. I'll definitely say. Sorry, you don't have a third one. You don't have a third one.

We never know. All right. Knock on wood, baby. Everything that I've seen is that the more people are exposed to this, regardless of a party, like specifics of the bill, the less they like it. Like it is slowly, you know, just the process of this fighting is draining.

It's plus Elon Musk throwing his weight against him. So they really have to get it now, but I assume they will. Trump has been, apparently running the phones. He's calling everybody, he's telling them. Here's an argument against that. So there's multiple people who basically so, again,

it has to pass both sides of the House, right, or the Congress, right? So first it passed the House of Representatives, barely, then it went to the Senate, but they made a bunch of changes, and that's why it's going back to the House. Yep. And there's a lot of people in the House, including, I guess I shouldn't say a lot of people. I saw a couple people, including Marjorie, Taylor

Green, say, I absolutely will not. pass this bill unless the AI regulation stipulations are removed. That was removed. They were changed. They weren't removed. It was changed from a 10-year ban from states regulating AI to a five-year ban. And this is Ted Cruz really pushing for this. That was at least of like 24 hours ago. It actually literally might have changed since then. But the, there are certain things. I mean, this is the thing that she, once she had passed the bill was like, I didn't know this was in there. I wouldn't have voted for it. And so she's like been making this big crusade. There's other folks for whom several of the measures. I want to say one thing.

Imagine Marjorie Taylor Green makes a big crusade. I'm not going to vote for this unless I get rid of this thing. And then she gets a phone call from Donald Trump saying you should vote for it. My assumption is she will fall in line.

Probably, I mean, I don't know. I don't know either. There's various, it's just there was a number of issues because basically to get the thing through the House of Representatives, a whole bunch of people are like,

well, I want this thing in there. And then that got removed in the Senate. So in theory, that's going to go back and be a bunch of fight. And really, I think you're right. It's the question of, can Trump convince a bunch of people to not make any changes.

to just run it. And maybe, but they at least have been saying repeatedly over the past couple weeks, whatever it's been, that they are not going to approve it. So, you know, it's possible. You kind of have to wait and see to see who stands on business. That's the real question. We've been talking about the off-the-pod, too.

People don't stand on business, bro. I was complaining about that today. Well, I don't think I necessarily want to be the guy who, you know, cherry picks hypocrisy. I guess, but this was Steve, Steve Bannon, not to bring Steve Bannon into the conversation, but listening to another...

Can I give a little off-pod thing? This guy's obsessed with Steve Bannon. If you don't know who Steve Bannon is, it's fine, good for you. He's deeply obsessed and he constantly to bring up Steve Bannon. So please tell me about your love interest, Steve Bannon. He was getting interviewed. He was getting interviewed again recently.

And I think we had been talking a lot about the discrepancy within the Maga movement and the Republican Party in general. And Steve Bannon is this guy who's very like hardcore original Maga tea party kind of before that guy who built... Real hot-blooded American. Yeah. God-fearing Christian American. Yes, sir.

He built Trump's platform and campaign, basically. He was the guy. And one thing that really frustrated me is when I watched an interview with him at the end of last year that was right after Trump had been elected, I want to say the beginning, maybe it was beginning of this year. And he's laying out

all these like policy stances and principles of how he stands against like oligarchs and he stands for the working class and all of these things, right? And you might disagree with that outright the fact that he supports Donald Trump to begin with. But I think specifically the hypocrisy I see is that he was like,

in that interview he makes a giant carve out for why Elon Musk is actually all right. He's like, fuck Bezos, fuck Zuckerberg. Yeah, but then Elon, you get a pass. About to be this active part of the administration, he makes a carve out. And now here we are with these disputes around this bill, Musk taking a certain stance, separating from the administration, the party kind of fracturing a bit under the pressure of a few of these things.

And Bannon is just openly fuck Elon Musk now. And it's like, dude, I listened to your interview four months ago. And you just made this giant concession. And I get it. People listen to this and they're like, yeah, grifter's going to grift and stuff. I think it's just, you know, taking things at face value, it's hard to just view the hypocrisy, I guess. And then looking at someone like Major E. Taylor Green, I want to have faith that like now people are actively speaking up against something. I don't think she stands for a bunch of great things outside of this.

But in this moment, it's like, oh, if she's going to stand against this bill, I guess I can agree with that. But will she actually hold it? She gets the phone call? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I'm a. I've low expectations. In a way, a deficit hawk. I'm always talking about how I don't, I think the debt is damaging for America.

And there's people on the Republican side who are like, fuck yeah, deficit hawk, I'm voting against this bill. But then when it comes time to actually vote against it, there's like one guy. It's like Rand Paul. Like nobody else, they all talk about it. But then when they put the vote. Who's the Wisconsin senator?

He's also standing against it too, or did he cave? I think he caved. The only people that vote didn't vote were, uh, Tildog. Tom Tillis. Yeah. And Susan Collins.

Susan Collins, Tom Tillis, and Rand Paul, the only three Republicans. So it became 50-50. So Vance had to come down to do the tie-breaking boat with the 150. Which, by the way,

happens too much in America nowadays where we have just this deep, deep, deep, fucking split, 51-50, vice spread. Like, that's supposed to be for emergencies

and it's for everything. Anyway, we're, maybe for Bill, it's a big update, right? We'll give you more as the, if it passes the,

I mean, here's another way of looking at, though, all of them arguing about this, the fundamental problem is them increasing the tax cuts and we're going to go $5 trillion in debt. And like that's so bad. And that's what matters. And they're not really talking about changing that. And it's like we're, I think no matter what happens with this, we're a little bored.

Did you see they change the rules on how, because when you have the bill, you have to say how much it costs, how much it makes, right? And they change the rules on costs where the tax cuts don't count anymore. They're just not included. It's like three trillion and removed. Okay. And so there was a vote on that, like, that doesn't make any sense. And they lost the vote. So it is, so the cost is just less. Oh, well, it's all. Oh, wow. Damn. It's just a changing of the way. They're doing the lemonade stand approach. They're just fixing it. That's awesome. They've done it. Yeah, there's all sorts of funny assumptions. Like, when we talk about, oh, it's going to put, add five trillion to the debt. That's like this is, this gas by the CBO. And that gas assumes there's

no recessions. It assumes the interest rates a certain level. It assumes that no, like no pandemic. It's like best possible. Right. It's like, in the best, best possible scenario, we think maybe it'll be like $5 trillion. Who knows, man? Oh, it's not good. Hey, but there's some possible good legislation. And I want to hear you talk about it, Doug or Aiden.

Yeah, which is the dollar's value. Remember, we're going to squeeze that in. Yes, I understand that I'm doing the wrong order. Tell us about the dollar. Yeah, I was reading something this week. This is the dollar's worst year in 50 years. It is performing worse than it ever. You're such a European.

You're such a socialist European. Why am I for saying the dollars performing poorly? You don't like our greenback. Just saying, you don't like George Washington. You don't like freedom. You don't like his face. It's because we didn't move to the cool plastic money that you can't rip. You want plastic money.

I want the plastic money that you can't rip. You want gold to balloons and you want plastic money. So you're saying we should swap to Bitcoin. Is that what you're saying? And we're ready to Blake L.S. Next topic. Next topic. And imprisoning.

No, you're right. This has been the worst year for the dollars. It's like, you know, did you have the year? In 50 years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a stupid.

Does that mean like for a lot? What does that mean? Worst year for, because in my pocket, it looks exactly the same. That's true. Yeah, that's true. And also, I think you might have the same question that I do is,

what does it mean when a currency actually loses its value, right? Because it's like you're comparing it to other money that also shifts in value. And my understanding is that the simplest way do this is that there's like a basket of like developed countries currencies that is like averaged out and then you compare your currency against the pool of everybody else. Perry, can you pull up the DXY?

Just Google DXY. And ours is trending down. Which means we can buy less dollar, right? Less purchasing power, right? Yeah, for overseas goods. Okay. Um, you just go year to date if this will not be. Yeah, this is what it is. You know,

we, you get furor, sorry, fewer euros with your dollar. if you were yen with your dollar, then you would have gotten at the start of the years. Yeah, those are the things trending up at the moment. Are the euro, the pound, the yen. I mean, the yen was already really weak, so I don't know how much the bounce back really matters, but the yen going up.

Oh. Even Britain. Oh. It's bad. It's a damn tragedy. The Swedish croner going up. But one thing I thought was slightly interesting about this before we talking about the consequences of it

is I have a lot of, you know, Canadian friends and family. I have a lot of Australian friends. And talking to them, their situation, even with this, hasn't really improved. Their currencies are doing so poorly that even as we've had a bad year, theirs have barely rebounded against ours. They're still in a really, really bad spot. So because when I was looking into this, I expected to look at, you know,

every developed country's currency and see it kind of rebounded. in comparison to the U.S., but it's shocking to see that other people are also, or other countries are still struggling to that degree. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of weird effects that happen with currencies falling like this. Like, one of them is that it makes U.S. exports more competitive, which is an interesting thing. Like, there are European manufacturers who are actually frustrated with the euro being slightly stronger because it's hard for them to export things to America. Their stuff is more expensive, compared to.

And that's not even including the tariffs. So, you know, there's weird effects that are going to happen with this. But what sucks is if you are somebody who's just a hardworking person holding your savings in dollars, not necessarily in stocks, not necessarily in real estate, you just have it in dollars, you're just losing money. You're just, you can buy less things. I remember a villain chair argument from a while ago. We were posturing what could be the strategy of this administration and the tariffs and how this is going to play out throughout the year, right?

I recall the argument that all of this was an intention. effort to devalue the dollar and make American exports more competitive. Like reset the system, get the dollar amount, a dollar down, and then we can sell more to other people. So we did it. Harry, can you pull up the picture of victory achieved that Bush did in Afghanistan or whatever? Mission accomplished? We pushed back against that at the time. So I was wondering. And we're looking pretty stupid. If I'm a stupid guy posturing that argument right now, or maybe the really smart guy posturing that argument right now. Well, how would you push back against that?

What I would say is they have... If you full screen that, yeah, go to Google image. This is a victory speech. Go on. Why did America win? So there's a manufacturing index for America that is not going up. So the idea that this would lead to more than it hasn't happened yet.

Now, maybe weaker dollar will lead to something and maybe tariffs lead to something. I'm not going to say nothing. But it's convenient to point to the one thing that may be going in a weaker dollar, going the direction, but not the other things they said, like it's going to get our 10-year borrowing costs down.

Those are not gone down. Like all the other things they said were part of this picture, they're ignoring the ones that didn't go their way. And the ones that do are like, it was all part of the plan. It's all part of the plan. You're ignoring the grand plan in its execution. You've no patience.

It's all coming together. Yeah. Can I ask a question? Yeah. What's going on? What is to the average person? Do we want the dollar to go down or up? Like, do we want it to be devalued?

Because I often hear that that, that like it is an explicit goal to devalue the dollar because then we are able to sell things to the international market because they're able to buy more of our stuff so we become more competitive. Is that a thing that, I assume it's, there's good and bad, right? Yeah, I think it's a really tough question to answer. I wouldn't be able to tell you that there's a right, there's an answer to that. I think you want it to be.

I mean, the basic, I feel like the basic positive examples that you'd see in front of you, right, is anything that is imported would be cheaper for you at. the American. And then when you, if you chose to travel abroad and you went on some sort of trip, all of a sudden your money's worth more wherever you travel to. No, no, other way around. You're saying, you're saying if the value goes up. If the value goes up. Oh, the value goes out. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The value goes up. You can travel and you're the king. Like, people have been traveling to Japan last year and they had a great time because the again was really weak. It all was strong. You felt like your money went really far.

Would it be accurate to say that if the dollar is stronger, you can consume more? Like, you can buy more stuff, but then your ability to sell into the international market goes down. So it's like kind of different group. You know, if you're a manufacturing group that sells internationally, you like the dollar being weaker. But if you're going to Japan and you're to some guy, then yeah, you can't buy as much stuff with it internationally. I think the more I think about it, I think

if your economy's running well and sound, you want a strong currency. However, the big thing is that it makes your debt's easier to pay. As your currency gets... And we have a lot of debt. Perry, put up a ton of debt. Pull it up again. So we did it. Yeah. And we're done, we're done, we're good? Wait, the dollars are going down, though.

The dollars, no, but the dollar going down means helps you pay the debt. Helps you pay the debt. Okay. If I owe $100,000 and that buys less bread, then the amount of bread I need to pay the debt. You know what I'm saying? It's like the actual value of what we owe is less. Okay.

So we did it. We did it. Yeah. I think what we're saying is that the weak dollar and high borrowing costs of combined to create to create a toxic sludge that is now a mission accomplished. Yeah, I don't know. This is something you've got to wait and see. Yeah, but

if, what I would say is, if you're holding your money in a bunch of cash, you will feel this. This is what be bad for you. A consistent weekend in a dollar, you're gonna be like, at least get treasuries

that match inflation or something because you're gonna, you will feel the loss of your purchasing power quickly if it keeps going at this pace. Get it into the metals company. It's free money. It's, it just prints money.

And it'll keep going up. It'll never stop. It actually is going down, right? It went down a little bit. It didn't go down a lot. That's true. It's the best time to buy then. It went down a little bit.

Seekwa is also interesting. There's some updates in California, Aidan. Do you want to tell us about it? Yeah. And I just, let's start this off by saying, we can all agree, environmental regulation is bad. It's always bad.

There's no nuance to this conversation. Dude, as I was walking in. And when we talk about environmental regulation, we say, hey, it's actually bad in this instant. If you love the environment, you should be upset because there's no nuance to this. It's either the environment is good, or bad. That's the only thing we're talking about.

I know the tone you're taking, but it's tough for you to talk about nuance when I saw you walk in with two aerosol cans, spraying in a circle in the air, and then you dumped a toxic sludge into the garden out front. And you started stomping on the front. Dude, there's a guy in front. I tared and feathered him.

Yeah, he was just trying to tend to the guard. I didn't like that really goes beyond the environmental consequences. That doesn't mean. It's just a mean thing to do. That's just, that guy, that guy just died. Oh, shit. Yeah. So, so, So there is something called

the California Environmental Quality Act that was passed by Ronald Reagan when he was the governor of California a long, long time ago. And this law over the decades, it was initially introduced as something for people to sue over environmental concerns

related to building in the state. So if something was going to get built in a plot of land that had great environmental consequences, you had a means to sue the government in order to combat that project. But as the decades have gone on, what has happened with this is it has been weaponized, at least for the people that have pushed for its removal in California, weaponized to block or delay housing developments and also other types of building projects in the state.

Like the high-speed rail, too, and everything. Yeah, so it's impacted California high-speed rail, it's impacted homeless shelters in Los Angeles. It's impacted apartment buildings in San Francisco. There's, you know, and this isn't necessarily all, like, grand public works projects. There's an example of there was this large, mixed-use tower building that was meant to go up near Hollywood,

or what's the record building called? Tower records. Tower records. Meant to go up right next to that, and it was meant to be a mixture of office space, apartments, high-rise buildings that in Los Angeles are pretty rare, right? And presumably those weren't going to be necessarily affordable units or public units or anything like that. But that was a project that was halted by the use of this act. And now two bills in California are getting passed in order to combat the effects of this law. So this is quoted from the New York Times. one of the bill signed on Monday will exempt from CEQA high-density projects as long as they are not on environmentally sensitive or hazardous sites.

The other bill will create sweeping changes that are aimed at accelerating legal review and that will exempt numerous types of development projects from farm worker housing to child care centers. This legislation will also make it easier to rezone areas to allow for more housing in some cities. So California has been facing this housing crisis for a while and Gavin Newsom has wanted to lead the charge in dismantling this specific regulation. I think it was ever since we talked to him. Things have been on the up. Do you know what I'm saying? Like I feel like this guy was not listening to my concerns.

That's a good point. Perry, bring up the picture again. Give me for the picture of me, Doug, and Gavin. Because I think we got through to him. And there it is. That's Gavin Newsome. I think we got through to him, Doug. And I think we made a real impression. And now he's finally making a movement on getting housing box.

I saw some quotes from him. in possibly the same article, where Gavin Newsom, Governor California, basically said, um, people are so mad about housing that we cannot afford to wait any longer.

We can't, this is, this is no longer something where we can debate it. We just have to make a change to get more housing built. And I appreciate that. I appreciate it.

I appreciate understanding the urgency of the situation. Yeah. I think it is so, so core to people's frustration. He has a goal of, uh, getting two and a half million housing units

built by 2030 in California. That's what Gavin Newsom is hoping to push or do by then. And I think the detractors here, there are a lot of environmentalists who have spoken up over the years over the repurposed use of this law, the way that it has been manipulated from what

it was originally intended to be. And then, and I think this is a big part of the NIMBY movement in people who don't want new housing to come up in their area. They utilize the legal aspects of this legislation to sue and get rid of the housing projects that might otherwise be popping up in their area, right?

Yeah. But on the other hand, there is genuine environmental concern that some people do have. Some examples are Nick Jensen with the California Native Plant Society. We do a great disservice to communities and biodiversity when you choose to silence their voices. He and a number of other quotes I saw, basically traditional environmentalists speaking up and saying that the consequences of this will be something that affects wildlife like bears, like sheep in certain areas of the state, or things that just harm things like waterways and things that are publicly available to people that live in California. But the main thing here, and I need to read, I think I need to read each of the bills closer to see what direction or how the change. to the law actually take effect, but the evaluation is that it's the new bills are meant to get rid of the way the laws are, is being abused, not get rid of its general purpose of keeping

critical environmental spaces in California safe. So I, I hope that's the case. And I think anything that encourages building and helps deal with the home crisis, housing crisis. This is not working. This is not working. So. Changing it is good. Yeah. It's like well, I think that's the main thing, right? It's well established.

It's not working. That it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah. Seco's a, I don't want to say a disaster. It's so bad. So again,

the love of God. It's just so bad. I am not saying and nobody would suggest that environmental regulation isn't important. Stop it like that though because you're imagining

this person who's about to write a comment when you said disaster, but then you said so bad. You're like, okay. Phew. It's when we talked, it was a while ago we talked about, you know, when the first time we ever talked about how there needs to be some degree of deregulation and people's response was, well, environmental regulation is really important. Yes, we're super on the same page. I think the environment is really important. This law though, this ACS CEQA is just abused over and over and over and over to just stop things that shouldn't be stopped. Some examples. In San Francisco, they stopped 34 miles of bike lanes for four years, not because of environmental. because they were saying, oh, this might infect traffic flow in parking.

They used Sequa, an environmental bill, to stop a project to build bike lanes for four years because of traffic. There was an infamous case at UC Berkeley where they were going to turn this park. I think it was People's Park, I forget, which when I was there was not a great area, but they're going to try to turn it into like apartment. They were going to build student housing. Student housing for students. It's too expensive to live there as a student. Super great. It's right next to campus.

Obviously it should be a student housing complex And then the neighborhood sued using Sikwa to say that the noise of students Was environmental pollution. That's horseshit. That's not real. There are cases in San Francisco where You haven't seen my parties.

Some of the new folks like Peskin or Dean Oh man, I'm Blankin and Dean's last name. So many examples where it's like, oh, hey, we're going to turn this parking lot into mixed use, you know, apartments and housing structures. And they're like, no, no, no, no. that's going to, it might affect gentrification, so we should shut the whole thing down.

And just by invoking this law, you can basically like blackmail or extort or just slow things are happening at all. Telling me, I just want to be clear, that somebody sued to stop developing a parking lot because that would be gentrification? Yeah,

469 Stevenson Street, Aaron Peskin used Seekua to stop the 400, almost 500 housing units, citing insufficient analysis of gentrification. That's crazy. It's a parking lot. Yeah.

And this is Peskin, who I think is one of the worst You can't gentrify our plumbered American parking lots. It is part of our culture to have parking lots, I will say. You can't make your joke about look at the 405 every time you talk about L.A. And then be like, ah, the parking lot. I'm constantly being bullied, Doug. Actually, you're not even on my side.

Fuck, nobody's on my side. Yeah, because you're wrong. Everyone's constantly bullied me about liking the city that I live in. Oh, what a crime. Yeah, it's a piece of... What a crime. All right? I'm taking away your Skittles treats.

This is not an acceptable opinion. I still have these. That's true. So look, I just, this is not about should there be environmental regulation. It's that this law has been clearly abused by people to basically just stop anything from being built. Coincidentally, the people doing this generally are the ones who are homeowners or are going to benefit from things not being built in the areas that they have influence over. Oh, it's about the character of the neighborhood. Yeah, no, we just want the character of the neighborhood to not change.

And so I just feel like it is more important to build. We have to build housing. That is the way you help at least substantially alleviate the affordability crisis. Yes, there's other factors. We have to make things. We have to people lamented last time that we talked about Tesla and said there should be more public infrastructure. We can't build public infrastructure because they're just lawsuits that slow it down for 10 years.

Genuinely, 10 years are just slowing things down because of endless lawsuits that come up over and over. I've heard of straight up blackmail from like people I know where like labor, unions, black male companies, and we're like, they filed... I told you that in confidence. It's like, this is like comic book stupid shit. So this law is being abused. I really like that Gavin made this big push to exempt, not entirely, but just from

government projects on non-sensitive land. And they're just, there needs to be reform. Like, we are swung way too far in the, in quotes, environmental side. We have to get back to reality where it's actually about the environment and not just random people stopping whatever buildings they don't like. I think... I mean, the simple demonstrations of this is like, was this environmental law intended to stop homeless shelters from being built in Los Angeles?

Probably not. And reevaluating that and making changes is what needs to be done. So it seems like an exciting piece of legislation. Like all things we got to see. But if this starts to work, that's good momentum. Yeah. And Newsom like stopped the California budget from being passed. He was like, unless we get these bills through that are going to a,

allow the government projects to actually move forward without constantly being stopped by Sequa, I think it was brilliant. Like he's, he's really is putting a ton of effort and putting his money where his mouth is in terms of getting housing built in California. So like genuinely credit to him. I'm really stoked about this. I think people will give credit once results happen. That's what everything. I think most people don't give a shit about the language of a bill, who supported what, whatever. Yeah. If they just see things happening. Yeah. They will be, they'll fucking be happy. I think the hard thing with this, though, and we've talked a lot about, like,

well, I don't see the changes right in front of me, or I don't get to see the changes within the period of this person's administration. This is one of those things that will not have immediate effects. It will take years, decades for this to be fully taken advantage of if it works in the way that's intended. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. I think it's a good thing that a politician would be pursuing policy that won't necessarily be reflective of something that gets him reelected in a few years.

Wait, wait, hold on. I completely disagree. The point of this is to make sure things are happening in the next few years rather than decades. No, but in the same way that the consequences are seen from this law over the course of decades, right? You mean like environmental? No, no, no, no. The problem with the initial law, like the sequel law and the consequences of that. We saw the consequences of that occur over decades.

And building is something that happens relatively slowly. Not that I don't think there's hopeful progress to be made in the wake of this in the next few years by any means, but I think the full ramifications of it and the full benefits of it won't be super obvious to the broader population for a long time. And I think that's the tough thing with passing things like this is like you really do have to do it

because you think it's right and not just because you think it's something that's going to get you elected in two years. Yeah. That's not, I don't think that's any, I don't think that's discouraging either. Like, I think this is a good, this is a good direction to go in.

Somebody has to create the change for something that has been demonstrably bad over decades. What I'm excited about, though, is the next two to four years. Yeah. I get what you're saying. There's obviously going to be knock on effects and we'll need to revisit it, right?

And also, it's not like sequel was repealed. It's like just carved out for specific government projects. No, I'm not saying. There should be, Yeah, but what I'm, what I would argue, though, is if this has the effect that it, in theory, should, the high speed California rail should actually get finished, at least the first leg of it within the next few years. And there's a big, big, big, big difference to every politician in California between four years from now saying, look, we did build a train. It's not the train we wanted. It's not as big as we wanted. But it's there and it's usable versus four years from now saying, we need another $50 billion, we still have nothing useful. Yeah, I guess if you're right. This literally might be the difference between major infrastructure. projects by the state actually getting built.

And that is the type of thing in the short term will be like, okay. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying if we flash forward two and a half, three years and the train is built, then everyone goes, this is a great idea of this fucking one. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, for anything that was in like the delay limbo because of this, that gets to come out of that because of this and just finishes. Which is to my understanding, almost everything. Like, Seco is just used to slow, I mean, I shouldn't say,

I don't know this, the percentage, but it's baffling how many large projects in California, all have Sika thrown at it. Because again, anybody can do it. Anybody can file a lawsuit and then suddenly it's like, boom, another couple of years. I do it for fun. I wake up and I file like five or six years. I've got to file so many it against you if you keep that fucking microphone. Do you know

how bad it is for the environment that you speak into the ceiling instead of into the microphone like an adult? God, I'm all right. Like an adult. I can't believe, Doug hates the environment. I can just imagine the comments. I'm going to write some of you. I'm going to write some of you keep talking about my mic discipline.

Well, I think this, I feel like this leads us into the next big, you know, legal thing we wanted to touch on because there was a big Supreme Court decision recently. So I'm excited to this one because I don't know heck all about what you guys are talking about here. Yeah. Okay.

I didn't read about it. You guys had teach you to me, teach you to me actually. Yes. There was a big case decision by the Supreme Court, I think one day ago, a few days ago, something like that. and the short version, there's a lawsuit around birthright citizenship. So one of the cool, quirky things

that Donald Trump did when he came into office. He's such a quirky guy. He's a quirky guy. He dropped an executive order ending birthright citizenship. This is blatantly against the Constitution. You can argue, I guess, whether or not that should be the case,

but it's very clear that... How important is the Constitution? I'll be honest with you, this was one of those things where if you go and read it, it's tough to make the argument. It's like back against the wall, I have the villain chair to save my life, the aliens win. Here is the logic.

The logic from Trump is birthright citizenship, meaning if you're born in America, you automatically get citizenship, was meant to, I believe, in his words, it was about like helping slaves become citizens and guaranteeing that as emancipation happened that everybody became a citizen. And that his argument is now it's abused where somebody like takes a trip to America while they're pregnant to like try to have a kid here and then they give citizenship so it's abused or whatever. So that's his argument. However, so he made an executive order saying that this isn't the law anymore. You cannot do that. That is so, you can't do that. His argument was that birth

rights citizenship was for slaves? That's what is. I saw, so look, I saw one quote of him about this. I'm sure he said 300 dumb things about this. Okay. That one of them he definitely said it was met for, this was like two days ago. Okay. Maybe you guys can find the quote. But, you know, the argument is, oh, this is being abused. It's not, you know, it's not really being used to support citizens. Yeah, this is the 14th Amendment. So it was in the wake of, like, ending slavery. And that was one of the purposes.

Okay. To guarantee citizenship to all of the slaves that were free because of the already born there. Here's the gatorade of misinformation. Again, this is the perspective of people pushing against it, is that if the idea is anybody who's born on American soil becomes a citizen, that does incentivize somebody from another country for example, to get across the border illegally

right when they're about to give birth and if they can give birth on America's soil then their kid becomes a citizen. And that means you stem a whole business of let's say the cartels in Mexico being willing to traffic extremely pregnant women across the border to try to get in this time window

that is extraordinarily dangerous. So there are these bad incentives that can happen. I don't know the specific amount of it. That's the argument. I think this is, yeah, a lot of countries around the world, I think the majority

do not have birthright citizenship. I think the U.S. and Canada, I think Canada also has it. I think so. Are two of the only ones that do. You can go to Japan and have a kid and be like, cool, we got citizenship. Can we get a fact check on that? Can we get a fact check on Canada? Anyway, the

I think if you want to revisit this conversation and you want to tackle the issue of birthright citizenship and change the way we just look at that in America, right? I think that is a fair conversation to have through the legal process that we have.

Like if you just amended, if you managed to get enough cohesive opinion to amend the Constitution to adjust this going forward, we're going to be like most of the rest of the world and not have this anymore, I can understand that, right? But if you're just releasing an executive order that blatantly stands in

to the Constitution as it is. Right. You... Right. And also, if you were to approach that process, I think it's really important that similar to, you know, dealing with immigration now,

rather than deporting a bunch of people, you should be giving people amnesty, like retroactively giving green cards or citizenship to the people who are already here and then changing the laws and changing the process going forward. Yeah. That's how I think this should be dealt with as well. I do think it is a fair conversation to change the rules around this.

But the way it's being gone about is, that's the insane part. That's what you're saying. So they went through all this work to get something amended to the Constitution, Congress, House. They didn't do that. No, no, I'm saying that originally. Originally. To get this added to make birth rights of citizenship real. Yeah.

All American government ranches worked together and made that happen. And now the president is writing executive order that undoes that. Yeah. And the idea of us having the political will to pass an amendment. in modern day is absurd, right? Like with many things, what's supposed to happen is that Congress would amend the law

if we don't like it. That's how the cover tree is supposed to work. And then in practice, we have a president and multiple presidents who just write executive orders, which are the lowest tier of like, they have lowest prio, okay? Yeah.

Congress and the Supreme Court, they get to overturn or change executive orders if they want. Executive order is like the lowest ranked power thing. Not anymore. But if nobody stops it, then it is kind of sort of implemented. So, which is what this case is.

And that kind of loops back around to a later, I think a really important part of this, but I want you to continue. But keep this idea in your mind that we're talking about here because I think it's, the idea of Congress not being able to get anything done because it comes back around

to the logic of the Supreme Court. It's the source of many of our problems, in fact. So, all right, so the Supreme Court ruling, the case was about Trump making an executive order that blatantly goes against the Constitution. So there's pretty much no debate that that's not okay and it's going to get shut down. But the real question and what this came down to is that immediately upon signing this executive order, there was a federal judge that made a universal injunction.

So universal injunction is the idea that one of the federal judges, there's about 800 of them or something like that, in the United States, any one of them can place an injunction and say, here's this lawsuit about whether Trump's executive order is legitimate or not. I'm in a place an injunction that puts a pause on the entire executive order for the entire country. Any judge can say, we are fully stopping everything for everybody in America until we sort this out. And what this means in practice is that any of the federal judges, again, there are like 800 of them, can at any point when a case comes up issue an injunction that completely stops a law that or an act that the executive branch has done. So this particular Supreme Court case isn't really about birthright citizenship. It is about, do the judges in the American system have the ability to set in a universal injunction that completely stops the law from applying that the president had just done?

And historically, presidents hate this. To give you a sense of the scope of this, this was not a thing 100 years ago that all these judges would like essentially freeze something that the president has done. So there were basically zero, 100 years ago. And then Bush, during his eight years, there were six total universal injunctions. So six. Older Bush, younger Bush. Younger Bush. So 2000 to 2008. Mission accomplished. Oh yeah. Pull up the picture. Mission accomplished.

Mission accomplished. There were eight times, or sorry, six times that a judge said, hey, I don't like this law you're doing. I'm putting a universal injunction to pause it. And then with Obama, it doubled to 12. So you might have heard of some of this stuff. Basically a couple judges were like, we don't like what you're doing Obama and just put a hold on some of the stuff and like permanently stopped what he was able to do because of these injunctions. So that was, it was 12 already by Obama. Trump's first term, 64 universal injunctions.

So Trump's style is just to kind of like go, he just goes out blasted with, he loves executive orders. And so judges responded by being like, you cannot do this and they put tons of universal injunctions that stopped many of these things he was doing. For example, the Muslim travel ban.

Then you had Biden. He had 14. So he had the same problem. He, like, during some of the COVID vaccine stuff that he was trying to do of making it mandatory, that got a universal injunction. It didn't go through because there was a right,

leaning judge who was like this isn't constitutional and completely shut it down. And then Trump in his second term got 25 in the first hundred days. So he just, Trump is just on another level in terms of this. So yeah, the argument and the question that the Supreme Court was asking is, should this be allowed? Because this is only in the last couple decades. Should any judge in the federal court system be able to put this permanent pause on an entire country's law? And there is a real genuine, argument for both sides, right? If you elect the president into power, imagine, right, with Trump, it's kind of different, but imagine your dream, if you're left-leaning, dream left-leaning candidate gets into power, and then everybody loves them. And there's one federal

judge who just hates this person and can completely stop any of the movement and legislation that this person wants for months or years. Like, this can happen. And it's, you know, I think it is easy to understand why that can sort of be abusable. And then the counter-argument, is this is a check and balance on the executive system. The whole point of this is that if Trump comes in and makes an executive order that isn't constitutional or that there's unclear the legality of it, that the judicial branch has the ability to shut it down until there is clarity around it by the Supreme Court, say. So short version, they ruled universal injunctions not cool anymore.

They're technically still allowed, but the, you know, six to three vote in the Supreme Court based on party lines. they voted, these universal injunctions are in overreach. We as the Supreme Court, we can shut down executive orders. The president shouldn't have total unlimited power here, but this idea that any one of the judges should be able to totally

stop this is too much. There are some asterisks here, but that is the core of it. So now that process that can happen is gone. So Amy Coney Barrett, one of the younger justices, she was the one who wrote the majority decision on this case. And her claim basically comes from

If this tool was always meant to be and always accessible, then why has it only started to be used from Bush onwards, basically, in the 2000s? Obviously, this was never an intended check to exist. And then the minority decision, which was pretty scathing, if you go and read it, it's pretty interesting, speaks to, we're losing this check that in the future might allow, infringements on things like gun rights or,

and things that exist on the opposite end of like the political spectrum. Because when you look at how this has affected presidencies before this, you know, Biden also hated that this happened to him all the time. You know, obviously different amounts between him and Trump, but generally this use of universal injunctions is really, really recent and it frustrates all presidents that come into power. The thing I wanted to mention here to keep in mind is that this has come primarily in the era

of insane congressional gridlock, right? We're in the most polarized, most gridlocked era of congressional politics, lowest approval ratings, and that has largely grown to be in the last two decades. You know, there was more bipartisanship and more cooperation

in the 100 years. in the hundred years before this. Republicans hate Congress, Democratic take Congress. People hate Congress more than they ever have, right? Which forces the hand... It forces the hand of the executive to make decisions where they might otherwise

be legislation getting passed through Congress. I think that's the main thing here, right? It's like, in order to create the change that I campaigned on, I have to make executive decisions because the congressional body doesn't have the gas to do it. And now we're in a situation

where the political landscape is drastically different from when these laws and intentions were originally drawn up. And I think this is actually a hard question to answer because I think in the short term, I agree that this check on Trump, who even by the numbers seems to be overreaching the most is probably really important to have, right?

But I do think in the long term, the idea of this being something that constantly inhibits decisions made is also not great. That was my mixed feeling when I was learning about this. It feels like a Band-Aid thing that we would want in order to stop the decisions

that I don't like Trump is making. But in the real long term, I think there needs to be something better. Like, the incentive structure of politics should not be that we have to issue executive orders to do everything all the time. Yeah. It's just super broken.

The thing I was coming back to on this is, like, it's as though any single person in Congress, of which there are also, what, 500, something like that, I forget the total number. If any single person of Congress could completely shut down another branch of government. And that's not the case. Congress has to vote. And then if the majority votes on a thing, then they can actually implement a change. And so it feels intuitively, like this doesn't make sense. Why would a single judge be able to fully lock down?

something of an entire, it's, that goes beyond a check and a balance. That's like one having, that's one branch of the three having complete domination over the other. And if you remove that power, it's not like the judicial branch can't put a check and balance on Trump. They can still absolutely, the Supreme Court can come in and say, it presumably will, what you're doing a birthright citizenship is not legal. Congress can also do that. I think again, it's what you're saying. Like the, to me, my intuition is that the problem here is that Congress doesn't do anything anymore. Congress is supposed to be one of the checks and balances. And if that's completely gone and you're leaving it entirely up to the judicial branch, then yeah, the judicial

branch is going to want extra power to make sure they can curtail what the president's doing because the president is doing way too much because Congress isn't doing anything. Like, it's all, the balance is all fucked. Yeah, I see everything you're saying, and I guess I agree. I just, it's spooky because we're in a spot where the executive wants as much power as possible. Yes. And we have no other check right now. That's the only remaining check. On him specifically. Presumably if you had, like if a Democrat gets elected after this, right, I feel like when it comes to Supreme Court decisions, they aren't likely to be leaning in that person's favor.

Right. Or if there's midterm elections that go a different way or whatever. But, you know, for right now, that is the only check. And maybe. So one other interesting thing about the majority opinion from Barrett. This is done by this is done and dusted, right? They ruled it. Yeah, they made the decision. So there is some confusion here after this decision as well,

but I wanted to note one other thing besides that, which was, you know, in the absence of these checks, what's your opinion for the, like, besides Supreme Court decisions, then what system do we have to check federal power anymore? Like, what do you think of that? And she wrote, Barrett wrote, that, well, you still have class action lawsuits. But this creates a problem where,

in order to gather a class action lawsuit, you need like the money, the time, and the resources. So now you've turned the like check process into a monetary one. It isn't something that is accessible to like the average person. You know, a normal person who might have the ability to challenge one of these executive orders in court probably does not have the money or the time of the resources to combat that. So it's like a half like here you still have class actions to deal with this, but it's not really equivalent or realistic that they will be used in that way.

Yeah, a clarification there. So this isn't saying that this ruling isn't saying a judge can't put an injunction to stop a law. The difference is whether it's universal. So if you right now sue Trump and you say this executive order you just did about birthright citizenship, that's bullshit. And the judge says, okay, I'm going to put an injunction and pause the law for you. That's what an injunction is meant to be. It's like the people involved in that specific case can get an injunction and they have basically, you know, immunity from the law until the case is resolved. A universal injunction is where you sue Trump and me as the judge says, on behalf of everybody in the entire country, I'm putting a pause on the law for everybody.

So what this ruling is doing is saying a judge can still put a pause on anything that Trump does with an injunction, but it can only cover the people in the lawsuit. you can't proactively cover everybody else. So in a class action, the reason that becomes more valuable now, because if you do a class action lawsuit and get, you know, what you're representing, let's say, an entire giant swath of people, the judge can now put an injunction on that, cover all of those people. So that might happen now. And that's one of the criticism of this as well,

is like now people are just going to flood the courts with cases because instead of getting a universal injunction for everybody from a law that overreaches, every individual party is going to have to go and make their own lawsuit. So it's going to be this cluster of just cases going on. And the ramification that I think people are really, really worried about and what the minority opinion had been writing about is because this injunction doesn't exist anymore, it's can you as the executive, because this is an example where it feels so blatantly unconstitutional, right?

So if you as the executive, you as the executive, you as the executive, you as the executive, executive can issue any order, like her, one of the examples was guns. If I just issue my executive order that says all Americans have to turn in their firearms. Now, the theory is that that stands until it goes through the entire process up to the Supreme Court decision. And I can act on that in the meantime, even though we all recognize that it's blatantly unconstitutional, I can act out the consequences of my executive order for as long as it takes. for that to get to the Supreme Court decision. Which is a huge problem.

Which seems crazy. Yeah, it's a big problem. That's why I'm, yeah, I'm also, it's not coincidence that this is happening right when we have a president who is trying to use more executive power than literally ever, you know, and it's basically that question of like, this system would hamper any president, and then here's the person who's pushing it as far as can possibly go. And again, I just want to reiterate that Congress should be one of the checks. Congress should be able to pass a law that overrides or nullifies what an executive order is doing,

but we basically have lost one of the three branches because they can't do anything. Atrioc, what is the conclusion of this? You guys didn't solve shit. You guys are debating back and forth, and I thought one of you would just tell me what the solution is. We came to you. That's, dude, it's one of many instances where I'm like, dude, this is really complex. There's a lot of issues back and forth. I can really see pros and cons.

I wish Congress had their shit together, man. I wish Congress actually did their job. You know what we should do an episode on is what we think went wrong with Congress. Because I remember reading about how there was eras, 70s, early 80s, where they're constant bipartisan votes. People voted on many different areas. And it has slowly but surely split. And I wonder what the incentives were that made it that way.

I have a theory. War. Not kidding. When Congress is most united, it's when there's a national enemy, right? It's when the Soviet Union is the big enemy, and then everybody, you know, coalesces around a single movement. We have to take down there. And then there's, you know, there's some dissent within that. And then the Cold War ends and everything becomes kind of a disaster until 9-11, right?

And then suddenly we're insanely united. Approval rating of Congress goes through the roof and then it deteriorates over the next couple of years. And there is a world that I'm not happy about, but I think is quite likely where we enter into a cold or hot war with China more explicitly. And then everybody organizes around that, like we're on a sports team. and that's maybe the way out. Not saying it's good. I don't want that. No, but like historically, that's when we unite, right?

I was actually thinking Iran. I was actually thinking boots on the ground in Iran. And then suddenly we're on. We rally behind that. I hope that it's not the solution. Tell me I'm wrong about that. Well, I do. I won't disagree that it's a unifier to have an outside enemy.

I do disagree that that is the only reason, the only incentive that is causing people to become more bi-bitism, more polarized. Sure, I just, yeah. I'm saying the times where it didn't happen, it's usually when there's an enemy. What if the enemy is poverty? Wow.

I mean, do you clear, I agree with you, by the way. I'm not, I don't like that. No, no, no, I see what you're saying. I just, uh, the idea that China needs to invade Taiwan for us to get our Congress to work. So, you can see how that is, uh, unappealing future for me to live in. If the enemy is poverty,

I feel like that's, that's, that's, you know, you joke, but that's kind of what, isn't that kind of what populism is? Like, you're kind of rallying, you're rallying behind the idea of like, the working class versus the elites. And I'm not saying that's necessarily

translate, but I think it's why there's this weird pocket of, you know, people that flip-flop between, you know, people who work factory jobs that flip-flop between Democrats and Republicans because Trump managed to speak to some working-class sentiment

and then... Or the same reason why there's, you know, this... I understand that when you dig into this, it doesn't actually make sense. But people who are like, yeah, I like Bernie, but now that he's out, like, I guess I'll vote... I'll vote Trump like four years from now. There's a reason that happens.

There's some crossover here of, like, United working class they're in like anti-poverty. I want to jump on this. Because there's a guy James Ganesh who wrote a piece in the FT basically saying if you look at history, democracies work best in a crisis.

I don't think it necessarily has to be a foreign war or an invasion. Just enough people if there's something that we all agree is a problem that is now unignorable because he also said people will ignore it as long as they fucking can.

As long as you can keep this train on the rails as rickety as it is, they'll keep going. But once there's a crisis, then everyone sort of agrees, like we gotta, we gotta make something. What if we make a crisis? So you're saying, manufacture a crisis.

A false flag. Right. You make it up. We hire people to very convincingly act like aliens, right? And we're like, guys, we gotta pass some laws about sequel. Dude, it's us three in alien outfits.

And we say, if you guys don't get poverty together, we're invading this. Damn. And then you see the Senate and they're shaking hands. Well, we don't want to get invaded. I think we got to take one of the two.

Mission accomplished. This is the most brilliant solution yet. This is the most brilliant solution yet. Fuck. It could work. It could work is all I'm saying. Politics are so fun. Wait, but I was going to say,

go for it. I want to abandon politics if we can. I would like to, yeah, I think we did a good chunk. It was like all really serious stuff that I think is nuanced and difficult a thing. I want something where give me something easy. Give me something easy. Give me something easy.

Give me a sound easy. I got a few video perhaps. Yummy. Oh, well that's also politics and based on Trump. It's the exact same thing. God damn it's politics. Oh, because it's the TikTok. It's literally the same thing. He said TikTok and I zoned out. I was like ah, TikTok. You did so. I mean, it's scrolling. Look, it's saguays while we'll do it. It's quick.

All right. This is another example of basically executive overreach of Trump. No, make it more fun. Change it. Sorry. Don't you hate millennials? Yes, I do. On TikTok, spreading their socialist propaganda.

I hate videos on TikTok. I want to have control of what they say and think. I don't want another country to have it. It should be my control as the United States government. That's why we decided to ban TikTok last year in April 2024. So as a reminder, because everybody, you know, nobody talks about anymore. TikTok is supposed to be banned. Okay.

Wasn't it like a while ago now? Over a year in April 2024, remember they? No, but they said a date, right? They said like, well, bad by this day. And the date came and went. So in last April, Congress, both Congress, they actually very unified on this, by the way. The enemy was TikTok. That was the enemy.

Again, literally it was like China is taking all of our data and is influencing people. So they like overwhelmingly voted this through House and Senate. Then it goes to Biden's office in April. Biden signs a new law. It is a straight up law by Congress and then signed by Biden. Biden, and then it goes to the Supreme Court. And in January, they vote, yes, this ban is legitimate. It's not infringing on free speech. This is a real valid thing. And then Trump comes into office and issues an executive order delaying it for 75 days. And his quote is,

essentially with TikTok, I have the right to sell it or close it. No, no he doesn't at all. So unlike some of the other things. Listen to undo everything we just talked about, though, because you guys just said like, all right, no regular judge can stop an executive order. Fine. but the Supreme Court can, but now he's overruling the Supreme Court with an executive order? Yes. The examples that mostly have happened with Trump

is he writes an executive order, it's probably not constitutional, and then a federal judge puts a universal injunction on it and stops it. And now that process is going to change where it has to go to the Supreme Court. So first he does a thing, and then Supreme Court or Congress

are scrambling to catch up with it. This is the opposite of that. Congress passed a bill. It was signed by Joe Biden and then it was approved by the Supreme Court. The entire government universally said, this is a law. It needs to be banned. And then he wrote an EO and said, no, I have control of it.

This is, of my understanding, as a dummy, the most blatant thing that he has done. Of like, at least- Ignoring the process. Ignoring everything. With the birthright citizenship, it's like, okay, obviously that's going to be ruled stupid and unconstitutional, but it does need to actually go through the process. This has gone through the process. So when he first came to office first day, he's like, we'll deal with this in

75 days. And then April comes around. He says, we'll deal with this in 75 days again. Signs another executive order. And then we talked about this on a Patreon episode a month or two ago. June, this month, came by. Signs another executive order. We'll deal with it in 75 days. And then, like, this week, he announced he's found a group of

very wealthy people interested in buying TikTok's U.S. operations. So he talked about this on Fox News, I guess, and was like, yep, you know, we've found some buyers or whatnot. But it's so bizarre because this is one of the most brazen possible thing,

and nobody's talking about it or cares, and because it's less impactful, I think, but it's truly bizarre to watch, again, the very, like, executive order-based approach that Trump is doing, which in most ways is just not how the government's supposed to work at all. And this is the most clear-cut, like, everything about this is wrong.

And TikTok should be banned as of six months ago. I guess it just doesn't have a lot of teeth, like, from a... People stopped caring. It's not really in the conversation as much anymore. I think the reality is probably most people don't want TikTok to be banned. Right, right. So they have no reason to like really get behind it. With all this stuff going on, the idea that Congress would be like,

hey, let's hold off on all the other important things going on. We want to really force Trump to sell it. Like, nobody's going to like that, right? And so it's in this weird limbo where it's exactly what you said. Just nobody cares. But it's, it's just sad. As the middle chair, I've signed an executive order. You have to buy me more candy.

And I've signed it. And it is now law. Well, actually, the Supreme Lemonade Court has already ruled. Oh, and here it goes. Oh, my. There is. I can see why Trump does it. Yeah.

I actually got a real world example of why he does it this way. It was so quick. You tell me I can just be ripped it? I just ripped it and I got candy. That's awesome. Okay. Yeah, I guess if maybe somebody listening can provide some sort of insight here, is there a piece of this I'm missing that you... Well, I'm sorry, never mind. I was going to make a dumb joke.

No, make the joke. Make the joke. Do not edit this out, is. I remember around the band, people were doing TikTok dances to save TikTok. Maybe they've been so consistent about doing that. Oh, that's what worked. That's what, maybe that's why. So in terms of constitutional authority, you have.

The president, on top of that is Congress, on top of that is TikTok dances. The fourth check. Yeah. Well, the fourth, yeah, it's the media. Even with that universal injunction, we have universal TikTok dances. Yes. Okay. Your tone says you don't agree with it.

No, that's serious. You can tell because I am saying the words. Yeah. I still want them to ban it, man. It'd be so far. I just want to see what happens. As someone who's, I understand, I've seen all the arguments and I don't really care either way for that talk. But man, I just want to see what would happen.

I'm just interesting. That's a little bit of how I feel too, where have you ever gone to another country where they've banned some sort of website and then you just can't, you just can't go to that website all of a sudden. And, you know, China is the most extreme example, right? Where you need usually a certain type of VPN

to be able to access the internet beyond China. I mean, TikTok is banned in India. Oh, is it? Yeah, it's totally banned. That's what I mean. So in the U.S., I just want to see what it looks like because we haven't had that.

I can't think of anything we have like that where there's a piece of media or like a huge popular website where you type it into your internet browser and the US government is just like, yeah, can't go here. Free speech, baby. Like fucking Silk Road.

You know, stuff that's been seized. Well, what happened in India is pretty funny is like they just made a bunch of Indian-owned TikTok competitors and people started, like it didn't. I think people have this hope when TikTok gets banned that like the kids will finally, get off their phones.

This will work. It's going to be a utopia where everyone starts listen to the grandpa. I'm going to tap geriatric Nancy Pelosi on the shoulder and say, hey,

they actually, they just go to this thing called Reels. Yeah, you go to Reels. They go to Reels or YouTube shorts or something else. Next topic, Doug.

All right. Topic boy. Topic boy. Topic boy. I'll have some candy in the topic, please. Stop talking about the terrifying

overreach of a certain branch of government, and instead, let's talk about something a little more lighthearted, which is, I believe we spoke out of this on a Patreon episode. A few weeks ago, about like two weeks ago, hey, if you like tech companies kind of fucking with each other and having to spend too much money and having a hard time, this is a story for you. This is a finale. I love this story. Yeah, yeah. All right. So Sam Altman, he's the head of Open AI, who makes Chat, MT. He said this quote on the context of like, poaching. Giant offers to, you know, a lot of people on our team. You know, like $100 million signing bonuses more than that comp per year.

It's crazy. And I'm actually, it is crazy. I'm really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to pick them up on that. Cool. So that's good. So he comes out on this podcast and he says that Facebook meta is offering a hundred million dollar signing bonuses. This is an absolutely insane amount of money that would be unheard of and just baffling, right?

But maybe they are because they just spent like $15 billion acquiring this company, basically just to get the AI talent there. And so what's funny about this, this came out and we were like, and a lot of people, myself included, were like, holy, that is a lot of money going to AI people. That doesn't seem worth it. It's the same headline as the Shea Gilgis Alexander contract I saw this morning.

It's the same headline. Yeah. He's hired for AI. Meta. Meta got him. He has left the Oklahoma City Thunder. That guy's got a lot of talent. And so it's so funny is that in an internal meeting, a top meta executive said Sam Altman is lying about the $100 million bonuses.

And he's like, Sam is known to exaggerate, which is true. And in this case, I know why he's doing it because he's upset that we are successfully poaching some people from him. And so there's this tweet talking about it, how this is actually a brilliant strategy here from Sam Altman. So most likely this headline that everybody was talking about of $100 million signing bonuses and $100 million years. really comp is probably just a complete lie. But what happens now is anytime anybody talks to meta and they reach out and they're like, hey, we want you to leave and join meta and join our AI team. They're like, well, we heard you're offering about $100 million. And I'm like, no, we're offering like a couple million. And so now anybody who talks to meta is like super

disappointed or meta has to match it and go up to like $70, 80, $90 million, which is insane amounts of money. And they'll just like, they'll just burn through that and hurt stock and everything. And then on top of that, his whole thing of, they have successfully poached people from Open AI, but his line of like, our best people aren't leaving. So he also throws shade and anybody who leaves, makes everybody who stay be like, oh, I'm one of the premium people. I'm worth like $100 million. And so, and then it completely changes the narrative of like, okay, well, it's not people are leaving Open AI. That's not what's going on. It's the bad people who only care about money with the shitty culture. They're leaving. All of the best people are here. That's how good they are.

And then on top of that, anybody trying to put, like from any company now, if, let's say Google wants to go get somebody from Open AI, the Open AI person's going to be like, well, I'm actually worth $100 million. So you're going to have to up your price by, let's say, 10, 15, 20 times. So this is probably an insane sciop that he did to just fuck up meta's ability to poach. It's crazy. I don't, I don't even know this is legal. So question, question, do you both think that is that more likely, it's like, is that the likely explanation? Or if I'm Occam's razoring this, it's just, you know, just him saying, saying stuff. And this is like the retroactive, here's why Trump's tariff strategy is actually be snowed. I'm going to give an alternate take to both. I don't have a take.

I think this might be the case, right? It's like he's on an interview with his brother. He's time to orchestrate it. Like I, yeah, he could orchestrate it. I, I think they did make these offers. And actually, if you read the rest of this article, this is just a quote from the article. But the actual article was this. A meta employee asked a senior meta executive in an internal meeting that got leaked.

Hey, I saw Sam Altman say a hundred million dollar bonuses for some people. Is that true? If you actually read what the guy said, to me, it's more obvious that it is true or at least very close to true. Because what the meta guy actually said was like, He said, well, it's not signing bonuses. He said like, and he said, and actually open AI is matching us in a lot of these things. And also for most people, this is not, this is for very few senior high level rules. Like, you're getting great comp.

Don't worry about that. He had every incentive to like play it down as like, because he didn't want his regular rank and file asking for more money. Yeah. I think there's, and again, none of this is 100% confirmed. But my understanding, especially with the acquisitions of the aquilers, is at the very top of him of AI. is commanding this level of salary

and does have deep bidding wars between Open AI and meta. I think what Sam Altman lied about is that the people that did leave, he said, they're not the good ones. I think that's true. They're just a sci-ops. And I think he pretended like

we're not going to match that money, are we do it for the love? But they did. They did offer similar amounts. They'd offer maybe not the exact 100 million amount but they offered close because they wanted to keep that talent. Well, he also said the one thing that stuck with me

is he said, $100 million signing bonuses, and more in that comp per year. And I was like, you're signing bonuses $100 million, and then their fixed salary after the fact is also $100 million. Yeah, the salary is the part that seems crazy.

That seems absurd to me. Right, but in total absurdity, like not even grounded in reality. I think for a regular employee, yes. There's no feasible way that you're paying, you're setting up to pay an employee half a billion dollars in four years. There's no conceivable way that is really.

So then the counter argument is he did just do that. and bought Scale AI for 15 billion. And it was arguably to just get all the talent there. So I don't know how many people worked at Scale AI. I don't think it was that many. So, you know, if you average that out, it might be like $100 million average per person. I read a Bloomberg article where they had reported on this.

And the reporting from Bloomberg is that META has offered tens of millions on the high end. So that's what Bloomberg is saying. Is the high end not $100 million? But from what you're saying, I didn't see that full article. Sounds like probably they have actually. It would be nice if you could pull it up. If you could pull up the meta... I guess it wouldn't be in salary either, right?

Most of that would probably... It's good. So that's what I think he said. I mean, they asked the meta executive and he goes, it's not a signing bonus. It's other things. And what I think he's implying is... Because I've got...

I got a Jensen bonus when I was at Nvidia. It's all... It's a four-year vested stock bonus. It's like you're not... They're not going to give it to you up front because then you could just walk away in a year. They give it to you over a time period that you have to work there.

But I, and again, maybe it's a little less $100 million. But my personal belief is that that number is roughly accurate for the very elite, top, top, top level, people that think they can move their stock price. Because like you mentioned in a previous episode, if Mark Zuckerberg thinks you can do one good AI thing that gives them a 1% lead over Google, that translates to $15, $20, $30 billion of market cap, it's worth it. It's in the environment right now and the crazy, bubbly environment right now where if you're winning an AI, everyone just throws money at you.

It's infinite money for your stock value. That's what I think is happening. That's my honest opinion. But it is, I've got pushback for saying this too. I think it's hard to verify because it's all people's words. But I encourage people to really read what the meta guy said and think about it from the POV of him where he has to talk to this audience and pretend it's not as much as, because they will want more.

Convince his own employees, we're not paying that much to people. Without lying to them because some. Yeah, because it could leave out. When you think about it from that POV, I think everything he's saying is like, yeah, we have a lot, but it's not, don't get, don't get high ideas. Don't get crazy. Don't get crazy. Don't ask me for more money. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think he literally said, I wish you could pull up the article because, I mean, we can pause for a second. I really want to get the quote. We just like, Adish, we can pause and then. So I found the article. And he specifically says this, uh, for all the new AI boot campers here, you didn't screw up not getting $100 million. They laughed. You made a great decision.

Your comp is right where it should be. Nice. So, you know, listen, I, I think it's tough to say. That's really, your comp is right where it should be. That's such a line. Yeah. And so they talk about the thing and he said, you know,

they say, ask them with a hundred million dollars signing bonus. And he goes, that's not the general thing that's happening in the AI space. And of course, Sam's not mentioning what the actual terms of the offer are. it's not a sign on bonus, it's all these different things. That's not a no. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, he's saying. $100 million is in the right.

Apparently Mark Zuckerberg has been personally calling all these people and hosting them at his home. What do you think they do? Dude, they smoke meats. They smoke meats. He's of meats or the MMA fight. Or the NBA fight. Or they win, sir.

You know, he raises his own cows in Hawaii? Oh, yeah. That's like a whole thing. That's like a whole thing. He bought like that whole section. of the island in Hawaii and the native Hawaiis are protesting it and it's it goes the rabbit hole goes deep is wind surfing with a full slather of sunscreen on his face that I kind of picture what I'm imagining is they do none of that and they sit in a dark room and talk about LLMs for like three hours most likely

none of the cool things Marks Oliver does now I think talks about money yeah probably probably talk about the amount of money he will give him I love we all have different takes I'm in the smoking meat camp you know what's effed up is that there was a world where Elon Musk and Zuckerberg were going to fight in the Coliseum and we didn't get that. We could have had that as the world. We have such a less fun world.

Yeah, instead we got Jake Paul, Mike Tyson, wherever that was. That's much worse. I don't know. That's like saying there's a world where Trump saved the environment. Like technically that it was possible. Like somebody floated that.

He writes the right E.O. He'll get through and notes on it. Mark beats the brakes off of Elon. he's just younger he's younger he's better shape he's smaller though we're gonna get into this details in the phone let's break it down you know weight matters a lot and he can fall on him

Elon can't be in good shape the man does not do anything healthy how much ketamine not the kind of a ketamine joke too I understand bro I'm a big ketamine you can't talk about it loaded up on kett yeah you talk about me like I'm like a Knicks fan like, oh, sorry, can't true about the Knicks here.

I'm not like, I'm not like a super stoked about ketamine. I'm like, it's a sports team. I like to make ketamine jokes about Elon Musk, but I understand that it has medicinal properties. I understand. Thank you. Well, one thing that I was thinking about

for the coming weeks is the, if anyone has any sick business stories, I've really, I've been patrolling and trying to get some better, or like just interesting, you know, random product that happens to be taking off or anything similar to that. If you have a business story and you're in the Discord,

which you can join if you go to patreon.com slash Lemon 8th Sand to submit. I really want to see some more story submissions because I want to go into our Discord for ideas. Because we're going to do our little end of episode Discord pitch. If you want to watch Aidan Calvin truly crash out, check out the last Patreon episode. Dude, he, his hands get wide and big

like he's fighting a bear and he just starts, shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Here, I'll synthesize it. I'll synthesize it right now. Maybe you're somebody who's not in the Patreon, you're listening to this right now,

and you're one of the people who commented about how we... Don't do it again. The robotaxies, why are we talking about robo taxis? But you're just, just invest in public transportation. Stop watching the show.

Stop watching the show. Just never watching it. Go watch and consume something else. That's the really synthesized version of my of my rant. I don't know how much more pro public transportation I could be. Throwing that in there. Throw that in there. If you want,

or if you can listen to a full crash out if you want, if you pay five dollars. The director's cut is worth it. I promise you. He loses it. You can unsubscribe. You make me mad. You make me mad just thinking about it right now.

Please. He was so wound up. It was fire. I loved it. It was one favorite Patreon moments. Business stories. Yeah. Please send number.

there's, I mean, there's actually a ton. I need to bring some. That's part of my job here. I've been focused on the politics. And also, I'll be honest with you, at the highest end of business where the biggest money is, it's all been AI lately.

So much AI. It's so much AI, man. I think that's the funny is like, we talked about the, you know, the triangle, the business tech politics triangle of like, oh, what would we talk about on the show? Our show is AI and politics.

And unfortunately, tech is all AI. Much of business is AI. Like, it's just insane. And the other of business is politics because it's like, yeah, It's become very, yeah,

this was different a few years ago. Like any, I think anything like fun and like, oh, damn, look at this new popular product that happens to be breaking out and people are buying a bunch of,

like, I've been trying to stuff just niche interesting stuff like that. Oh, dude. Labubo dolls? Yeah, that's what I want to do a story on that. I've been trying to find like sales data and stuff.

I know them to the extent that it is possible for a 34 year old man to know about Labo. But you know about them. That's the thing. They're doing well, bro. Okay, sorry, man. I'm excited to hear about it.

If I was making this point on my stream, it's like the first example I've seen, not the first, actually, TikTok is the first. But it's an interesting example of China cultural exports in a way where they used to be always a cultural importer in a way. They would make manufacturing stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like now LabuBoo dolls are a hot fashion item for celebrities around the world. And they're going viral on TikTok, which is a Chinese social media platform. Yeah. Like it's a bit of a beginning of a, Chinese cultural, you know, blue jeans and rock. A Chinese cultural revolution.

You guys both made that joke. Where's? I just mean, you know, in America's 80s day. I'm not even saying it's happening. Actually, I think it's a bad thing. Blue dolls are literally just gambling, but with status symbol ugly dolls. It's certainly not good.

It's just that they've gotten good at these things. They didn't usually, uh, Usually was the marketing type thing was usually for America. This is the problem. Perry, if you bring this up. This is us every week, okay? Is that we're trying to focus on business and then Trump comes along and does something. That actually is.

And then we got it. And we look at his sweet ass. Dude, I swear to God, every week I'm like, I'm going to try to not talk about AI this week. And I say no to so many stories. And then they put AI in a vending machine. What was I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do? I'm looking at this hot-ass vending machine story.

I'm not going to go talk about the nuclear power plant upgrade. the mini-machine story, and I have no problem with it. That is fire. That was great. All right. Well, thank you for joining us for another week on Lemonade's Sand, and we will see you next week. Bye. Mission accomplished.

When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, Productivity, and Innovation. Learn what's driving Canada's productivity decline and discover actionable solutions to reverse it.